India’s Uolo raises $22.5M to bring education technology to the masses • TechCrunch

[ad_1]

YoloIt is an Indian edtech platform that works with private K-12 schools to offer online educational programs to middle- and low-income families, and has raised $22.5 million in a funding round led by UAE-based venture capital fund Winter Capital.

The vast majority of edtech startups operate in a business-to-consumer business model and spend on advertising to reach parents and guardians of students.

Uolo says it reduces that cost by operating in a business-to-business-to-consumer model, working with private schools to allow them to offer online educational programs to their students and charging fees as part of school fees. The startup’s programs are also designed in conjunction with partner schools’ curricula, making it twice as easy for students to learn the same lessons.

The Gurugram-based startup develops and delivers tailor-made educational programs in the field of coding and English speaking. Students can access these programs on their parents’ smartphones.

“We’re taking education technology to the masses of India. And when we do that, the idea is to make it cheap enough, affordable enough so that people can take it to their kids,” Uolo CEO Pallav Pandey said in an interview with TechCrunch.

He said that the startup is able to offer its offerings to students at affordable prices.

Schools that partner with Uolo get an ERP platform called the Uolo School Platform for free. It works as a unified platform where schools can access fee management, report card management and attendance management on a single dashboard.

The ERP platform acts as a gateway for Uolo as it allows the startup to create an ecosystem once schools start using it. This encourages parents or guardians to use the app to receive communications directly from schools – rather than using typical communication channels like WhatsApp groups.

“What we’ve been able to do is get schools and students at one end of the platform, so now we need to make digital learning flow through us,” Pandey said.

Founded in September 2020 by Pandey and his brother Ankur, Uolo has partnered with more than 8,500 schools across India and currently reaches 3.7 million students.

The $22.5 million in funding came through a first round of equity and debt mix, which saw the participation of existing Uolo investors Blume Ventures and new Dubai-based Morphosis Venture Capital fund – along with Winter Capital. Although the exact details of the equity and debt ratio involved were not disclosed, Pandey told TechCrunch that the debt component was in the form of an optionally convertible note that would convert into equity over time.

The startup, which employs about 350 people, It plans to leverage the investment to expand its reach to 50,000 schools across India over the next four years and expand its education programs with courses across STEAM subjects in the coming months. For the latter part, it is looking forward to partnering with education companies as well as people and entities to develop quality content.

“The first wave of edtech companies in India demonstrated consumer interest in online education. However, they lacked cost-effective distribution. We believe that there will be a new generation of edtech companies that are able to build low-cost organic distribution, allowing students to by studying at $10 a year instead of $10 an hour.”Our investment in Uolo is based on our confidence in this type of company,” Winter Capital managing director Anton Varlenkov said in a prepared statement.

[ad_2]

Source link

Related Posts

Precaliga